“Lonesome Traveler” is full of familiar songs prettily sung, a sort of jukebox folk musical. Too bad it didn’t aspire to be more; still, it sounds great.

The play, written and directed by James O’Neil, gives a drive-by history of folk music in the last century, or at least the largely white version as embodied by groups like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary. It serves up songs that anyone over 60 and many younger than that know by heart — “Guantanamera,” “Midnight Special,” “Tom Dooley” and more than 30 others, played and sung by a skilled cast that encourages the audience at 59E59’s Theater A to sing along.

A sparse narrative accompanies the songs, which are arranged roughly chronologically, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the mid-1960s as the folk revival was being nudged aside by electric guitars. The cast members become personifications of various singers and groups — Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Almanac Singers, the Weavers, the Limeliters, Odetta and so on.

It’s not a particularly inclusive definition of folk music. The show’s two black performers, Anthony Manough and the fabulous Jennifer Leigh Warren, often seem sandwiched in as afterthoughts. And the song selection is virtually surprise-free, sticking almost exclusively to folk’s greatest hits. Does anyone really need to hear “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” again?

Not that Mr. O’Neil can’t be illuminating when he puts his mind to it. In a nice moment in Act I, he demonstrates how the genre’s tradition of borrowing from older songs produced “This Land Is Your Land.” Take that, “Blurred Lines” litigants.

And the cast, under Dan Wheetman’s music direction, occasionally finds ways to make oft-heard songs sound new. Jamie Drake, embodying Judy Collins, quietly claims the show’s best moment with a revelatory version of “Turn, Turn, Turn.” And Matty Charles and Sylvie Davidson, as the Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia, somehow make “Early Mornin’ Rain,” the much-covered Gordon Lightfoot song, more achingly beautiful than it’s ever been.

Mostly, though, the show merely gives its target audience — the PBS pledge-drive crowd — what it already knows, grit- and personality-free. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just that there was a chance here to surround the timeless melodies with substance.